  heng Zaidong’s studio is located on the second floor of an old garden house in Shanghai, next door to the famed Lilac Garden, which once served as the private garden of Li Hung-chang, who served as a minister in the Qing government. The studio is small, filled with wood boards and painting materials. But Zheng is quite satisfied with the space.
“It is one in a thousand, a architectural jewel among the old houses in Shanghai,” he says.
Zheng says he does traditional paintings at his home, which is arranged like on old Chinese house. And here, in this more western style studio, he produces oil paintings. The space is decorated with used furniture, which he considers simple but elegant and very befitting of a 1930s garden house.
Of his works, the Taiwan-born artists says,“Those who do wash paintings think they are too avant-garde; those who create contemporary art works think they are traditional.”
The artist, who recently had a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Gallery of Art, opens one of his art books and shows how different his works have been over the past 30 years. From 1978 to 2000, his works ranged from neo-expressionism to Chinese ink wash paintings.
Zheng studied film at World College of Journalism (today’s Shih Hsin University) in Taipei, Taiwan. Influenced by the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, the nihilistic young man stressed freedom of choice. He was reluctant to do a film job that needed to cooperate with others and was eager to be an free thinking painter.
During the 1970s and 1980s, he says he preferred a form of expressionism that chases for direct release of emotions and a kind of super-realism that is filled with imagination. He once travelled around Europe and went to New York hoping to advance his art career. But the experience made him realize that what fit him best was the expression of Chinese traditional art that consisted of natural scenery that was both elegant and pleasing.
 In 1989, Zheng moved from Taipei to mainland China. He says he wanted to find the root at the origin of Chinese culture. When he arrived, he found the country’s economy was racing ahead, and even in places like Hangzhou he had a hard time finding pure elements of Chinese traditional culture. And so he says he searched for a different way to explore the ancient world.
He visited the Tianchi Mountain around Suzhou, Jiangsu Province to see the environment that inspired the “Cliffs of Tianchi Mountain”, by Huang Gongwang (1269-1354), an artist who is considered one of the four greatest painters of Yuan Dynasty. He climbed the Que Mountain and Huabuzhu Mountain in Jinan, Shandong Province, to witness beauties of nature that appear in “Autumn of Que Mountain”, by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), a scholar, painter and calligrapher during the Yuan Dynasty. He says the search helped he see something rich and moving about how art is conceived and produced.
Zheng’s friend, Zhu Guozhi, once said: “On the top of the mountains, I saw him making sketches; while driving past him, I saw him photographing. When he sees old trees with curling branches or strange stones, he photographs and draws, and then touches them and enjoys.”
Zheng says he never spends much time composing a picture. But he thinks precisely about it, and then it becomes easy to make a wonderful composition.
 The 53-year-old artist likes to talk more about traveling rather than his art creating, and sometimes he stops to have tea. He says he creates when he wants to, and he spends more time reading and enjoying his life. Recently, his inspiration has come casually. When his reads a good poem from Tang Yin (1470-1524), a scholar, painter, and poet of the Ming period, like “Clouds vanish, the moon shines down flowers; such a still night, the flowers sleep in the moonlight,” he created a picture with flowers and the moon and he named it with the verse. When he read the dharma sutra and suddenly got enlightened, he made some paintings about Buddhist stories.
He admires the how intellectuals lived in the late Ming Dynasty. There was the idea that you enjoy every moment of your life, as told in Yuan Zhonglang’s “five cheerful things” that were mentioned in his letter to friend. So Zheng imitated those letters and created his own works of art.
Although Zheng does not care for much for composition, he says he painstakingly thinks about colors. He searches for something to give a sense of flatness to his painting, like the Chinese traditional painting, so he paints with propylene instead of oils. Propylene dries much faster than oil and helps him to focus on creating one piece.
First, he makes a background on the canvas, and then lays on one color again and again. Unlike the use of vivid and bold colors in fauvism, the colors in his works usually look similar, almost entirely dark hued, but actually, there are contrasts between the light and dark colors. His sense of color also suggests his art piece has been influenced by pieces such as “Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki, a great master of modern Japanese literature.
Zheng says he would like to break through old techniques and create something new. He points to his work about flowers sleeping in the moonlight, which was finished this year, and says that while painting it he was inspired by a sudden idea and sprayed some water onto a canvas that was not sufficiently dry. The water streaked down and made a special feeling of gentleness,  as if the flower on the canvas was streaming with water, filled with the power of the nature.
“This is what I often talk with Liu Wei about, the pleasure of painting,” he says. Now, one of his works can easily fetch $20,000.
Zheng’s work is based on Taiwan art market, and the collectors who enjoy Zheng’s paintings come from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and Europe. Since 1980, Zheng has opened his exhibitions in Taipei, Hong Kong, New York, Australia, and Mainland China, more specific, “Apparitions” (1990) in Hanart (Taipei) Gallery, Taipei, “Indulgence”(2000), Lin and Keng Gallery, Taipei, and the latest solo show “Happy to the End of Life” (2006) in Shanghai Art Gallery, Shanghai.
Zheng does not mind how others see his works. The high prices are something he tries not to pay attention to; he just enjoys his leisure as a painter. He says a painter should enjoy life and not seek to be a crowd pleaser.
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